From The News …

While I’ve been busy trying to finish the book and make serious progress on the film (which I’m supposed to show on the low-carb cruise in just 10 weeks), my inbox been piling up. So here are some interesting items.

Subtle changes in traditional lifestyle of native ethnic groups in the Yamalo-Nenets region have brought the first-ever cases of obesity. Until now, fatness has not existed in these population groups, but scientists say there has been a marked change.

Alexey Titovsky, regional director for science and innovation, said: ‘It never happened before that the small local indigenous peoples of the north suffered from obesity. It is a nonsensical modern problem. Now even a predisposition to obesity is being noticed.’

And what’s driving this unfortunate development?

Changes have seen the intake of venison and river fish cut by half, he said. ‘Over the past few years the diet has changed considerably, and people living in the tundra started eating so-called chemically processed products.’

Well, it sounds to me as if the natives are eating less red meat. According to the experts at various government health organizations, that means they’re getting healthier.

Researcher Dr Andrey Lobanov says nomadic herders nowadays often buy instant noodles in villages on their pasture routes and this has led to ‘dramatic changes to the rations of the people living in the tundra’.

Wait … are these whole-grain noodles? Because if they are, according to the experts at various government health organizations, that means the Arctic natives are getting healthier.

‘The problem is that carbohydrates do not contain the necessary micro elements which help survival in Arctic conditions,’ he said. ‘The seasonal diet has also changed – the periods when they do not eat traditional food and replace it with carbohydrates has become longer.’

No, no, no! Carbohydrates don’t make people fat. I’ve heard that from countless internet cowboys. If these people are getting fat for the first time in their culture’s history, it’s because they’ve become weak-willed and started eating too much. And they’re probably not exercising enough. Maybe some of them should become contestants on The Biggest Loser and learn how to stay healthy through long sessions of tortuous exercise.

Biggest Loser trainer has a heart attack

As I replied to The Older Brother when he sent me a link to this story, if I were still a Catholic, I’d have to go to confession because of my reaction. Here are some quotes from Yahoo news.

Fitness trainer and host of NBC’s “Biggest Loser” Bob Harper says he is recovering from a serious heart attack that left him unconscious for two days.

During which time he was on a very-low-calorie diet and lost some weight.

Harper tells TMZ he was working out in a gym in New York City this month when he collapsed. He says a doctor who also was in the gym performed CPR on him.

Jillian Michaels was spotted in the background saying, “I’m happy he had a heart attack. He doesn’t work hard enough.”

The 51-year-old Harper, whose mother died from a heart attack, says he spent eight days in a New York hospital and has not yet been cleared to fly home to Los Angeles.

Harper has been a fixture on all 17 seasons of “The Biggest Loser.” He served as a trainer on the show from 2004 to 2015. He took over as host of the reality weight loss program last year.

Perhaps because the public grew tired of watching Jillian Michaels say she was happy when she drove contestants into throwing up during exercise sessions.

How Breaking Bad star dropped the pounds

I admire Bryan Cranston because of his amazing range as an actor. Subtle humor in Seinfeld as Dr. Tim Whatley. Slapstick humor as the father in Malcolm in the Middle. And then … wow … the dramatic chops he put on display during six seasons of Breaking Bad.

Some years ago, Chareva and I attended a charity event featuring several big-name comedians … Robin Williams, Paula Poundstone and Jonathan Winters, to name a few. Cranston was the emcee, and he was a stitch. Very charming and very quick-witted.

Anyway, here are some quotes from an online article explaining how Cranston lost weight to make the chemotherapy treatments in Breaking Bad believable:

Howard Stern interviewed Bryan Cranston on March 4, 2014 and asked him how he lost weight so quickly for his role as Walter White on Breaking Bad.

HS: When you had chemo and was getting sick playing the part of Walter White, in order to go through rapid weight loss you deliberately didn’t eat for 10 days? True or false?

BC: False.

HS: How’d you lose all that weight?

BC: No carbohydrates. I just took out all the carbohydrates.

HS: How much weight did you drop?

BC: 16 pounds, in ten days.

HS: Painful?

BC: No. The first three days are really hard, ’cause your body’s changing and craving sugar and wants, you know, and then you deprive it of the sugar and it starts burning fat.

No, no, no. That can’t be right. People don’t lose weight by giving up carbohydrates. If Cranston lost weight, it just means he finally had the willpower to eat less and consume fewer calories than he burned.

Obesity blame and politics

Speaking of willpower, do Republicans and Democrats have different opinions on whether getting fat is about willpower? Apparently they do, at least to some degree. Here are some quotes from a EurekaAlert article:

People’s political leanings and their own weight shape opinions on obesity-related public policies, according to a new study by two University of Kansas researchers.

Actually, Republicans — no matter how much they weigh — believe eating and lifestyle habits cause obesity, the research found.

But among Democrats there is more of a dividing line, said Mark Joslyn, a KU professor of political science. Those who identify themselves as overweight are more likely to believe genetic factors cause obesity.

I’m not a Republican or a Democrat, so I guess I’m allowed to say it’s both.

Of course genetics figures into it. There’s a reason some people never gain or lose weight despite eating whatever and whenever they choose. That’s how their bodies are programmed. It’s genetics. But among those of us not so genetically blessed, it’s largely about what kinds of foods we eat. Genetics loads the gun, diet pulls the trigger.

Would you like actual chicken in your chicken sandwich?

When I order chicken at a fast-food restaurant, I kind of expect most of it to be made from chicken. That seems to be the case for many chains, but not for one. Here are some quotes from a CBC (Canada) article online:

A DNA analysis of the poultry in several popular grilled chicken sandwiches and wraps found at least one fast food restaurant isn’t serving up nearly as much of the key ingredient as people may think.

An unadulterated piece of chicken from the store should come in at 100 per cent chicken DNA. Seasoning, marinating or processing meat would bring that number down, so fast food samples seasoned for taste wouldn’t be expected to hit that 100 per cent target.

So researchers bought some fast food and tested the DNA of the chicken meals. Here are the typical results:

Subway’s results were such an outlier that the team decided to test them again, biopsying five new oven roasted chicken pieces, and five new orders of chicken strips.

Those results were averaged: the oven roasted chicken scored 53.6 per cent chicken DNA, and the chicken strips were found to have just 42.8 per cent chicken DNA.

So what the @#$% is taking the place of half the chicken in the chicken?

The majority of the remaining DNA? Soy.

Yummy. But at least their sandwiches are low in fat. And as we all know, that low-fat movement has done wonders for the nation’s health, especially among the younger generation …

More young people getting colorectal cancer

Obesity is on the rise among young people. Diabetes is on the rise among young people. And now there’s this startling development, as reported in The New York Times:

Cancers of the colon and rectum have been declining in older adults in recent decades and have always been considered rare in young people. But scientists are reporting a sharp rise in colorectal cancers in adults as young as their 20s and 30s, an ominous trend.

The vast majority of colorectal cancers are still found in older people, with nearly 90 percent of all cases diagnosed in people over 50. But a new study from the American Cancer Society that analyzed cancer incidence by birth year found that colorectal cancer rates, which had dropped steadily for people born between 1890 and 1950, have been increasing for every generation born since 1950. Experts aren’t sure why.

Well, maybe we can guess. Let’s see … every generation born since 1950. I was born in 1958. By the time I was 20, we were all being told saturated fat and cholesterol will kill us, while grains will make us healthy. Grain consumption rose sharply for the next 35 years or so and has only recently started declining. During the same period, food manufacturers added more sugar to foods to hide the fact that many low-fat foods taste like cardboard unless you make them sweeter.

Most colorectal cancers are considered a disease of aging, so any increase in young adults, especially when rates of the disease are on the wane in older people, is both baffling and worrisome, experts say.

By the way, red meat consumption dropped rather dramatically during the same period when colon cancer rose sharply among young people. Don’t the vegetrollians always tell us red meat causes colon cancer?

You can’t buy Kerrygold butter in Wisconsin

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it at least twice: when politicians rush in to “protect” the public from some supposed hazard, it’s rarely about protecting the public. It’s almost always about some protecting some established business or industry. Here’s an example from a Chicago Tribune article:

When Wisconsin resident Julie Rider shops for groceries, there’s one item she can’t legally buy at her local market — or at any stores in her state.

The law, requiring butter sold in Wisconsin to be graded for taste, texture and color through a federal or state system, effectively bans butter produced outside the U.S., as well as many artisanal butters that also aren’t rated.

This means some residents of the Dairy State have to drive across the border into Illinois just to buy their favorite butter.

Whether Wisconsin’s law was intended as market protection for the state’s dairy industry or is simply a means to ensure quality, Rider, for one, thinks it’s “crazy.”

Oh, I’m sure the law was passed to protect the public after thousands of cheese-heads became violently ill as the result of eating imported butter.

People might not have noticed if butter weren’t making such a comeback. But it is.

Though the rule has been on the books since the 1950s, it is churning new controversy at a time when butter consumption is on the rise in America as it’s increasingly thought to be healthier than margarine. Butter made from grass-fed cows, such as Kerrygold, is a staple in some diets and for the “bulletproof coffee” movement, where such butter is mixed with coffee and MCT oil for purported — but debated — weight-loss benefits.

A spokesman for the company that sells and markets Kerrygold in the U.S. and Canada, Evanston-based Ornua Foods North America, released a statement confirming it’s “currently working with the Wisconsin authorities on a solution.”

Well, thank goodness the government authorities are working on a solution. Perhaps they’ll nickname it something like “If you like your butter, you can keep your butter.”

Until the government says something like “Sorry, we meant limit CARBS, not FAT!”, not much will change very fast. It seems people listen to the government, for some reason. (They have your interests at heart, dontcha know)

I’d say genetics accounts for more than 10-15% of why some people never gain weight, as opposed to health in general. In the book for kids, we mention an experiment in which lean people ate 1,000 extra calories per day for 56 days. Some of them barely gained any weight at all, even though calorie math says they should have gained 16 pounds. That’s a genetic gift.

I think there is a missing piece here. The Gut Biom is in there as well.

I don’t know if anyone, at this point truly knows ratios, heck, I don’t know if there is a ratio. But the gut-biom is definitely in there. If what some of the experiments out there suggest is true, then for a non-trivial portion of the obese and metabolically unhealthy people out there might need is just a re-seeding of the gut. This could be a dream, but what is a cocktail of bacterial stew given to someone could fix *some* peoples obesity.

That is, how many people out there, who should otherwise be able to eat anything, but can’t solely because of a deficiency of their gut-biom.

Pure speculation from a little evidence from here and there. But fecal transfers have shown to take with them health conditions.

They sometimes carry Kerrygold at the local Aldi and they had it today along with a few flavors of their cheese. I mentioned the Wisconsin law to the cashier and her response was, “Instead of a law, why not just make what the consumer wants?”

I’d say genetics accounts for more than 10-15% of why some people never gain weight, as opposed to health in general. In the book for kids, we mention an experiment in which lean people ate 1,000 extra calories per day for 56 days. Some of them barely gained any weight at all, even though calorie math says they should have gained 16 pounds. That’s a genetic gift.

I think there is a missing piece here. The Gut Biom is in there as well.

I don’t know if anyone, at this point truly knows ratios, heck, I don’t know if there is a ratio. But the gut-biom is definitely in there. If what some of the experiments out there suggest is true, then for a non-trivial portion of the obese and metabolically unhealthy people out there might need is just a re-seeding of the gut. This could be a dream, but what is a cocktail of bacterial stew given to someone could fix *some* peoples obesity.

That is, how many people out there, who should otherwise be able to eat anything, but can’t solely because of a deficiency of their gut-biom.

Pure speculation from a little evidence from here and there. But fecal transfers have shown to take with them health conditions.

They sometimes carry Kerrygold at the local Aldi and they had it today along with a few flavors of their cheese. I mentioned the Wisconsin law to the cashier and her response was, “Instead of a law, why not just make what the consumer wants?”

Bob Harper : (He became a vegan in 2010 but resumed eating meat in 2013, he told Reuters.)

Kerrygold ?

“I wanted to let all of you know that as of early 2016, I no longer buy even the traditional Kerrygold brick butter in foil packaging. Why? A good friend and fellow food blogger visited Ireland and traveled for over a month to the various grassbased dairy farms in that country during the summer of 2015. She informed me that while the cows that provide cream for the Kerrygold butter are definitely on pasture and hence “grassfed”, they are being supplemented with GMO animal feed. This according to the local community and citizenry in Ireland. While I have not been able to confirm this story, I trusted its validity enough to permanently switch to another brand.”

Bob Harper : (He became a vegan in 2010 but resumed eating meat in 2013, he told Reuters.)

Kerrygold ?

“I wanted to let all of you know that as of early 2016, I no longer buy even the traditional Kerrygold brick butter in foil packaging. Why? A good friend and fellow food blogger visited Ireland and traveled for over a month to the various grassbased dairy farms in that country during the summer of 2015. She informed me that while the cows that provide cream for the Kerrygold butter are definitely on pasture and hence “grassfed”, they are being supplemented with GMO animal feed. This according to the local community and citizenry in Ireland. While I have not been able to confirm this story, I trusted its validity enough to permanently switch to another brand.”

Did you see on The Chew yesterday that Clinton Kelly, who had quit eating “mammals” has gained weight? He stated his cholesterol was better but as he had replaced the mammal (protein) with pasta his waistline grew. Proof!!

Did you see on The Chew yesterday that Clinton Kelly, who had quit eating “mammals” has gained weight? He stated his cholesterol was better but as he had replaced the mammal (protein) with pasta his waistline grew. Proof!!

What a great idea. Plastic food. You take hundreds of pounds of skinless chicken breasts, deep freeze them, and then grind them into a fine powder. Then add some water and let the (very little amount of) fat separate. Freeze this melange again and scoop out the fat layer. Take de protein rich block of ice and melt it. Dehydrate it. Now you have a very fine protein powder. Mix it with some binder and pour it into moulds to get perfectly identical “plastic-chicken-gummy-bears”. To improve nutrition, take some cauliflower powder or albino-romanesco powder, and mix to make “plastic-chicken-fiber-rich-gummy-bears”. Well, I suggest that the moulds have the shape of a chimera, a manticore or a Medusa’s head. This cultural appeal should help selling the product to the millions of jobless PhDs of the OCDE member nations.

If you receive complaints about the poor texture and flavor, add agar-agar and brewer’s yeast or “nutritional yeast”. And a tad of sugar from humanely grown beets. No sodium chloride, unless you want to poison people. If you want your customers to survive, add some spirulina or chlorella powder to help detoxify that piece of crap. All natural ingredients. So natural it puts breast-feeding women to shame. And it is fat free, so you protect your investment against heart-attack and stroke related lawsuits. For advertisement purposes, make sure to emphasize that this “state-of-the-art” food satisfies all FDA requirements and nutritional recommendations. Do not deviate one iota from the regulations, and you will become rich. Enjoy the many benefits of fascism, a.k.a. the spark-of-life!

What a great idea. Plastic food. You take hundreds of pounds of skinless chicken breasts, deep freeze them, and then grind them into a fine powder. Then add some water and let the (very little amount of) fat separate. Freeze this melange again and scoop out the fat layer. Take de protein rich block of ice and melt it. Dehydrate it. Now you have a very fine protein powder. Mix it with some binder and pour it into moulds to get perfectly identical “plastic-chicken-gummy-bears”. To improve nutrition, take some cauliflower powder or albino-romanesco powder, and mix to make “plastic-chicken-fiber-rich-gummy-bears”. Well, I suggest that the moulds have the shape of a chimera, a manticore or a Medusa’s head. This cultural appeal should help selling the product to the millions of jobless PhDs of the OCDE member nations.

If you receive complaints about the poor texture and flavor, add agar-agar and brewer’s yeast or “nutritional yeast”. And a tad of sugar from humanely grown beets. No sodium chloride, unless you want to poison people. If you want your customers to survive, add some spirulina or chlorella powder to help detoxify that piece of crap. All natural ingredients. So natural it puts breast-feeding women to shame. And it is fat free, so you protect your investment against heart-attack and stroke related lawsuits. For advertisement purposes, make sure to emphasize that this “state-of-the-art” food satisfies all FDA requirements and nutritional recommendations. Do not deviate one iota from the regulations, and you will become rich. Enjoy the many benefits of fascism, a.k.a. the spark-of-life!